“I think that we shall find that he is a good man, this guide,” she said.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked doubtful. He did not think that the mere fact that one was a qualified guide meant that one would be worthy of a gift of three thousand dollars. “Well,” he said, “you may be right or you may be wrong. But just think for a moment: What happens if you find that you are wrong, and that he is not a good man? What then?”

“We give him the money,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Or, rather, we send his name and address to the lawyer and he sends him three thousand dollars. I am not a court of law, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and it is not for me to make a judgement on whether anybody deserves anything. In this matter I am really only a…” She searched for the right metaphor. “I am really only a postman. That is what I am.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. “I see. And I suppose you’re right, Mma. I do not sit in judgement on my clients’ cars-every car receives the same consideration.”

“Well, there you are,” she said. “I have finished my drink now, and the children will have done their homework. They will be getting hungry, I think.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni lifted his glass and drained the last of his beer. “Before you start cooking,” he said, “I have something to tell you. I did not get a letter today, but I did see something rather strange. Your friend, Mma Mateleke-well, her car broke down on the Lobatse Road and I went off to deal with it, and…”

THAT SAME EVENING, while Mma Ramotswe was cooking dinner in her house on Zebra Drive, Mma Makutsi was preparing a special stew for her fiancé, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop. Phuti Radiphuti had shown himself to be a creature of habit, eating with senior relatives on certain fixed nights of the week, and then with Mma Makutsi on others. Mma Makutsi did not mind this too much-she would have preferred for him to have had dinner at her house every night, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before they were married and then this would happen anyway. Of course, there was always a chance that he would expect to continue with his peripatetic meal habits, but she would deal with that tactfully if the situation arose. She would be prepared to receive his senior aunt for the occasional meal, no more frequently than would be expected of a duteous wife, but she was not having that woman claiming more than her fair share of Phuti’s company. There was no doubt in Mma Makutsi’s mind that when a man married, his obligations to his female relatives, particularly those owed to distant female relatives, were eclipsed by the claims of his wife. But there would be opportunity enough to sort that out once the marriage had taken place. For the time being, the existing routine could be observed and, for her part, tolerated.

Men were strange, thought Mma Makutsi. There were plenty of people who held that there was no material difference between men and women, but such people, she believed, were simply wrong. Of course men and women were different, and women were, on the whole, different in a better way. That was not to put men down-Mma Makutsi did not believe in doing that-it was simply a realistic recognition of the fact that women were capable of doing rather more than men. In fact, thought Mma Makutsi, there was a lot of truth in Mma Ramotswe’s insight that while men still claimed so many of the top jobs, it was actually women who were running everything in the background. Men needed those top jobs to make them feel good, so that they could imagine they were in control, while all the time it was women who were in the driving seat.

She had considered this observation. “Perhaps,” she had said to Mma Ramotswe, “perhaps…”

Of course, men were getting better-that was another fact Mma Ramotswe had pointed out to her, and with which she was strongly inclined to agree. Old-fashioned men-men who could do very little about the house and could talk about nothing but cattle and football-such men were increasingly being replaced by men who had many more interests and topics of conversation. These new men, as she had seen them referred to, were not only prepared to talk about many of the things that women liked, but they also took a strong interest in clothes. One or two of them, she had heard, even put cosmetics on their faces, which Mma Makutsi, open as she was to new developments, thought was going too far. “There’s nothing much men can do about their faces,” she once said to Mma Ramotswe. And Mma Ramotswe, immediately recognising the truth of this, had said, “No, Mma, that is quite true. Men’s faces are very unfortunate. They can do nothing.”

This remark sounded somewhat uncharitable, and Mma Ramotswe had quickly added: “Of course, that is not men’s fault. And there is something reassuring about a man’s face. It’s… it’s like the land, I think. It’s always there.”

They looked at one another doubtfully, and tacitly agreed to defer until later any further discussion of men’s faces, and indeed the broader topic of men and women; such issues were never easily resolved, and no matter how readily men’s characteristics suggested themselves for scrutiny, at the end of the day men simply were, and most, if not all, women seemed to be thankful for that.

Mma Makutsi was certainly grateful for Phuti Radiphuti. He had come into her life at an unexpected moment, when she was almost at the point of reconciling herself to the possibility that she might never find anybody suitable. That would have been a bleak conclusion for anybody to reach, and particularly somebody as young as Mma Makutsi. But one had to be realistic, and there seemed to be few men apparently interested in a woman with problematic skin and large glasses. Most men, it appeared, were more interested in the likes of Violet Sephotho, the arch-Jezebel who had graduated with barely fifty per cent from the Botswana Secretarial College. She it was who had shamelessly attempted to win Phuti from Mma Makutsi by insinuating herself into a job at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, in the bed department, of all departments-how appropriate and inappropriate at the same time-and had, thankfully, failed. Violet would have shown not the slightest scrap of interest in Phuti had she not realised that he was a wealthy man. That changed everything in her book: How could she be indifferent to a man who was due to inherit a large furniture shop and the large herd of cattle built up by his father, the very elderly but not quite yet late Mr. Radiphuti Senior?

The material comfort that Phuti offered had not been a consideration for Mma Makutsi. Indeed, when she had met him at that fateful first session of the Botswana Academy of Dance and Movement, she had been unaware of who he was and what he possessed. All she knew was that here was a man with a very bad stutter and a marked lack of dancing ability. For a few brief moments she had felt a certain irritation at the fact that he had been designated as her partner, particularly with Violet Sephotho smirking at her with her elegant, deft-of-foot partner, but her impatience had quickly been replaced by sympathy. There was something gentle about this man with his awkward ways, and that could not but appeal to a woman. Affection and friendship had grown into something else, and she had come to appreciate and love Phuti more than she had ever loved any man. Such romantic feelings as she had experienced before were mere shallow infatuations when compared with the emotions that now overcame her. Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, she said to herself, savouring each word and its delicious associations; wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, Assistant Detective. No, that was wrong; she, not Phuti, was the assistant detective. Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec., Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti. Or even: Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec. (97), Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti. The words were ripe with a sense of achievement; it was a long way from that to Bobonong, and to the days when she had had nothing, or next to nothing; when every pula, every thebe, had to be counted and made the most of. People talked of grinding poverty; well, that was exactly what poverty did-it ground.